How the world can cut food loss and waste in half

This blog by the World Resources Institute (WRI) addresses the progress being made in reducing food loss and waste, and what needs to happen in the future to address this problem. To help address the key challenges, the international community agreed to halve global food losses and waste by 2030 under Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target 12.3. This blog discusses the Champions 12.3 progress report (PDF) by WRI and the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), which tracks the movement toward meeting SDG Target 12.3 and lays out a roadmap for what both companies and governments need to do to achieve that goal. Three steps are tracked: 1) Target: Targets set ambition, and ambition motivates action. That’s why target-setting is seen as an important first step toward achieving big reductions in food loss and waste. 2) Measure: What gets measured gets managed. Once governments and companies know how much food is being lost or wasted and where it’s happening, they can formulate strategies for how to address it and monitor progress over time. 3) Act: Ultimately, action is what matters. Although lots of great work is happening in the Target and Act categories, without good measurement it is impossible to know how much of that reduction (if any) is being achieved. As more countries start to conduct national food loss and waste inventories, a global picture should begin to emerge.

A blog by Compact2025 about the importance of reducing food loss to end hunger and undernutrition can be found here.

More on this topic

This article discusses the feasibility, safety and sustainability implications of using food waste as feed for livestock. Food waste is a matter intrinsically linked with the growing challenges of food security, resource and environmental sustainability, and climate change. »

This article reviews the feasibility of using locally available waste materials as fish feed in the aquaculture industry. The use of locally available food waste as an alternative protein source for producing fish feed has been suggested as a means of tackling the problem of sourcing safe and sustainable feed. »